Upcoming change

Cooking Merit Badge to Be Required for Eagle Starting Jan. 1, 2014

Effective Jan. 1, 2014, the Cooking merit badge will be required to obtain the Eagle Scout rank. Regardless of when a Scout earned the Life rank or began working toward Eagle, unless he fulfills all the rank requirements—with the exception of his board of review— before Jan. 1, 2014, he must earn the Cooking merit badge to become an Eagle Scout.

Note: This means that as of January 1, 2014, the number of “Eagle required” merit badges will be 13, instead of 12, and the number of “Optional” badges will drop to 8. In addition, this change to the Eagle required list will result in another change to the footnote to requirement 3 for the Star and Life ranks. Once the Cooking merit badge becomes required, the footnote will be changed again as follows: “* Choose any of the 17 required merit badges in the 13 categories to fulfill requirement 3.”